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In all of sports, a vertical jump is one of the most sought after qualities. After speed or quickness, the ability to jump higher is top on most athletes list as the ultimate in athletic feats. It is understandable why this is so because it is so useful in various sports. This is why I’m excited to give people a chance to meet Daniel Back of Free to Flyy. Not too many people would have heard of him,which is part of the reason I was interested in getting him to teach the masses because I love “under-the-radar” people who have valuable information to share with the public.
Daniel Back is a former basketball player and student (much like myself) who studied the science behind improving your vertical leap and now has information for people all over the world on his blog, Free to Flyy, and what impresses me the most is that this information is free for everyone and is better than most of the vertical leap programs out there that are extorting people’s money. He doesn’t have a whole heck of a lot of time to do interviews, but luckily I landed a quick Q&A with him. The following is one of the many good interviews I’ve had on this site so far. So without further ado, lets get into it. (This is a video of Daniel showing off his 40+ inch vertical, music is a bit suspect though LOL. But I really, appreciate when someone goes through or practices his preaching. I am more likely to listen to someone who has gone through the pain and has results to show for it.)
Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and how you got into improving your vertical jump?
My name is Daniel Back. I grew up in Milwaukee, WI. Right now I’m 22 years old and a student at the University of Wisconsin- La Crosse. I first discovered my interest in sports training back in 7th grade. That’s when I first started lifting weights. I also saw a huge increase in my vertical jump and general athleticism during that time. I dunked in 8th grade at an even 6 feet tall. After that experience, I was obviously excited to continue pursuing a higher vertical. Of course just doing squats and calf raises like when I was 13 did not continue to be effective, so I had to seek out new information. Adding plyometrics to my training, I was able to reach about a 40-inch vertical when I was 15. Unfortunately for the rest of high school and into college I spent far more time playing basketball than training. After playing one season at my current school, I ended up having to pass on the second season to get a job instead. That freed me up to work on my vertical.
Around that time was also when I finally found a good source of information that kind of put the pieces together for me regarding jump training. Within two months, I had regained what had been worn down over the years and went even higher. With shoes on, I’m 6’4”. I had the top of my head at rim height. That translates to a 44-inch vertical. After that, I started training some friends of mine and making YouTube videos of dunks and some exercises. I put up a blog to share information with people too. Eventually I started writing workouts for people online. That along with the training I’ve done with friends has taught me so much. Now, my blog has evolved into a full sports training site. I’m working on making it the best source of information on the internet, free or otherwise. My own training has taken a back seat to helping others train. I’m actually working third shift in a warehouse right now, which has messed up my body in more ways than one. But I do plan on pursuing a higher vertical again in the near future. Might as well go for 50 inches, right?
What are some of the mistakes you see out there from people trying to improve their vertical jump?
Oh man, there are so many. I’d say the most common problem is people neglect flexibility. Stretching is the easiest, simplest way to help your athleticism. I guess it’s hard for people to understand why, so they don’t do it. One of the big changes I’m making on my site is an increased emphasis on flexibility. Another common problem is people want to train too much. Jumping is an intense movement for your muscles, tendons, and nervous system. You have to do intense training to get better. You can’t do intense training for 3 hours every day. I’ve never written a training phase with more than 3 workouts in a week, and 2 is more common. Also, people expect results too quickly. If they go for a month without results, they think it’s not working. It’s important to realize that your body takes time to adapt to certain things. My one friend who has worked out with me for over a year now will spend three months training and not see any improvement. Then he’ll take a few weeks off and suddenly be jumping 3 inches higher than ever. Patience is a virtue.
What is the right way to train to increase your vertical leap and what are the factors to consider when going about this?
The first thing to understand is that there are several specific qualities that contribute to jumping ability. (strength, flexibility, explosiveness, coordination, etc…) You need to start by evaluating where you’re at in those different areas. If a powerlifter wants to jump higher, is it going to help him to do a 16-week program to increase his squat? No, he’s already got a ton of strength. He needs to focus on his ability to use that strength with explosive training and plyometrics. On the other hand, a naturally springy young athlete who has never touched a weight in his life will probably see great gains from increasing his squat max. You absolutely need to customize your training to fit your abilities. You want to start by improving in your weak areas. At the same time you want to maintain other areas, so except in extreme cases, you will want to do a blend of the various types of training. If you are starting out pretty much untrained, flexibility and strength should be your two priorities.
How important is strength training to getting more explosive? And how should people strength train for vertical leap improvement i.e. low reps with heavy weights or high reps with less heavy weights?
We might be dealing with a difference in vocabulary here. I think of explosiveness as an ability determined by the nervous system and the fast or slow twitch nature of muscle fibers. That ability is not very well trained by lifting weights. What you are probably asking about is what I would call power, which is defined as force times velocity. High power output is something that great athletes possess. Power is determined by how much force you can generate, and how fast you can generate it. Explosiveness will allow you to generate a certain percentage of your max force during a high speed movement like a vertical jump. Well if your maximum force is low, it doesn’t matter if you can generate a high percentage of it quickly, the power output is still low.
So you want both your max force and your explosiveness to be high. Max force is trained by lifting weights, so strength training is very important to being more powerful. Regarding a rep range, the purpose of strength training is to get stronger. That can be done with all rep ranges. Higher reps are recommend for beginners or people who have taken time off from lifting. Then the general recommendation is to progress to lower reps as you go. But any rep range that makes you stronger is a good one. You don’t want to get caught up in trying to make your strength training too sport-specific. Like if you want a higher vertical, you shouldn’t think that because a vertical jump is one powerful movement, you should only do 1 squat rep at a time. Or a 400 runner shouldn’t try to make all lifting sets 45 seconds long. The purpose of lifting is to get stronger.
Is there any difference between training for strength and training purely for explosiveness?
Again, I think we’re discussing what I would call power. Yes, there’s a difference, because being strong does not require that you generate force very quickly. A lot of people will take 5 seconds or more to complete a max squat rep. Yes, you do need to explode out of the bottom of the lift, but the demand for fast force generation in a max lift is nowhere close to the demand in a vertical jump or any other athletic movement. To be a powerful athlete you need to train explosiveness (as I described it in my previous answer) in addition to strength. There are two parts to the equation, rather than just one. ell, just like I said with the rep ranges, any exercise that makes you stronger is valuable.
Both the squat and the dead-lift are excellent exercises. Squats tend to be a little more quad dominant. Dead-lifts will hit your posterior chain muscles a little better, so the two lifts compliment each other very well. I usually use both when I write training phases. With that being said, if I had to pick one of the exercises, it would be the squat. It has a fuller range of motion, and also the energy from the descent is stored and then used in the ascent like in a vertical jump. That feature is lost in the dead-lift when the weight hits the ground. I think that’s why the squat is more commonly used as an indicator of strength.
Does having a low body fat help increase your vertical?
Yes, absolutely. That’s like asking does dumping the cargo from a plane make it easier to take off. Of course it does. Any weight on your body that is not contributing to your upward force generation is only weighing you down. With that in mind, big arms, shoulders, lats, and chest also limit your jumping ability. Those things do have value though, so I’m not telling anyone not to do upper body lifts. Extra fat does not have value though, so yes getting rid of it is very beneficial.
Would you recommend steady state cardio or interval training for fat loss when jumping higher is your aim?
Interval training without a doubt. This goes back to that explosive quality of your nervous system and muscle fibers. Any activity you do where you are not generating as much force as possible as fast as possible is a different stimulus on your nervous system than you want for jumping higher. Things like jogging and ellipticals train your nervous system and muscle fibers to generate force slowly compared to a vertical jump. Any change you can make to your cardio to make it more intense is better for your athleticism. I would rather see someone run four 400’s with 3 minutes of rest between than run a mile.
How important is recovery for training?
Training your vertical jump is intense. It’s not easy on your body. You absolutely need time to recover. This goes back to what I said about people training too much. If you don’t let your body adapt to the training, the training has no purpose other than to burn calories. If you just want to be in shape, go ahead and do Olympic lifts every day and squat 3 times a week. But to become a better athlete, you have to get rid of the “more is better” mentality. On my site I use 2-3 workouts a week and I recommend a week off after every phase and at least three weeks off after three phases. If you need to exercise more than that you need to find things that are easier on your body and won’t interfere with your training. I’m a fan of yoga as a way to maintain fitness, flexibility, and to some extent strength, without wearing out your body at all.
Is there a need to train the core and how should one go about this?
There is definitely a need. Some sports trainers say that doing exercises just for the core is a waste of time, because there is plenty of use of the core during all the other training. I think that you might as well keep making your core stronger for increasingly challenging situations that may come up in sports. My first recommendation for getting a strong core is to get past the current fitness trend. I don’t know why ab work ever turned into an endurance ctivity. The abdominals are a muscle like any other, so there’s no more reason to do 100 crunches than there is to do 100 bicep curls with no weight. It’s best to find exercises that are challenging, meaning 100 reps would be far from possible. Now in sports movements like the vertical jump, you never flex your torso like in a crunch.
You actually just lock your torso into place, making it rigid so force can be transferred into it and it can serve as a foundation for powerful movements of the limbs. With that in mind, it makes sense to use abdominal exercises that force the torso to maintain rigidity rather than crunch together. The plank exercise is a good place to start. I like to modfiy the plank by resting on my hands like in a pushup and then moving my hands forward above my head to make it harder. That way you can customize the difficulty of the exercise. Then from there you can progress to exercises that have the torso locked in place while the limbs are performing some movement.
On a final note, what would you say is important to focus, give us your final list of things to focus on for higher vert?
I would start with two priorities. Get flexible. Get strong. If you do those two things, plyometrics and explosive lifting will be far more effective and safe. Beyond that I would say learn how to do all kinds of exercise at absolute maximum intensity. There’s a difference between completing a set of 10 jump squats, and trying to jump through the roof on 10 jump squats. The key to sports training is quality and not quantity, so make every rep count. Also, it’s very important to learn how your body adapts to various types of training. For example, I know that I tend to make my best strength gains from doing sets of 5-10. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time on sets of 3. I’ll give it a shot here and there, but if I don’t get stronger for 3 weeks, I’m not going to do another 3. Or I know that when I do a peaking phase of just plyometrics, I tend to adapt to it pretty quickly. So I’m probably going to plan out 3 weeks of a given set of exercises rather than 8 weeks. Another important thing is to keep challenging yourself as you make improvements.
That means trying to add weight to the bar each week, adding a set of a power exercise to accumulate some stress on your nervous system, upgrading to more advanced plyometrics when you can, and so on. Lastly, I just want to reiterate the importance of recovery. Training itself breaks your body down. It’s recovery that makes you stronger. Never be afraid to just let your body refresh itself. Not once in training myself or anyone else, have I ever regretted taking time off. Daniel. thanks for the Answers. I know the readers of my site will appreciate it! Summary: I have only made my way through 1 of the programs on Daniel’s blog and I’m improving my vert as well as picking up quite a few techniques to implement into my training.I am now dunking a lot more consistently than i used to be and will bring up a video to show you guys the proof. With the knowledge I’ve learned from Free to Flyy, I know I can get an amazing vertical leap workout to help my performance wherever I am.
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